WHEN ADVERTISING GOES WRONG…

It is no secret that I am a longtime proponent of blogging. It took me quite a while to get over my inexplicable aversion to using Facebook. It took other booksellers, who essentially felt sorry for me, to explain the powers on Instagram. I am an advertiser of sorts I suppose, but I would like to think that I do just enough to keep the lights on and the brand name in the thoughts of my clients. There is nothing worse than a bookseller, or anyone else for that matter, who sends out TOO MUCH content! Stop with the never-ending automatic responses, feelers and email reminders that I’ve left items in my basket… I get it. I know you have shit to sell and I know that I have left more shit sitting there that I can’t afford right now. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to keep it there! As a matter of fact, the basket at some selling sites is a way to track how long it takes to sell something. If an item sits in my basket for over a year with nobody purchasing it, am I more or less likely to pull the trigger and buy it so that I can now represent the item that wouldn’t sell???

Over the weekend, a few old friends sent me a link to a newspaper story from a town that used to be very close to my heart. Problem is, I have seen essentially the same newspaper story on the same town every year for nearly a decade now. How many years in a row can a store, a town, an event be called “an undiscovered gem” before we just have to call bullshit??? The town has been written about in every southern lit magazine on earth. The town has been the location (setting) for novels and film sets galore… Why in the world would another newspaper article be written about something that has clearly been covered, actually trampled over, for years and years? Is it because someone is paying for this sort of content? No matter really… This sort of advertising just seems a bit contrived and disingenuous. Personally, I would much prefer to see an ad for a fifty year old business that says:

“Visit this bookstore because we want to know you have not forgotten about us!”

Let’s be honest, clean-cut and simple in our dealings. We have too much white noise to be or do anything else.